Ten Things We've Learned About The NSA From A Summer Of Snowden Leaks

"The truth is coming, and it cannot be stopped," Edward Snowden told readers of the Guardian in June. At the time, just a few weeks into the publication of documents that the 30-year-old former National Security Agency contractor had siphoned from his workstation in Hawaii, that prophetic statement might have seemed like grandstanding. But close to three months later, the collection of Snowden's revelations has grown to the megaleak proportions of WikiLeaks' Cablegate or Daniel Ellsberg's Pentagon Papers, with no end in sight. For those who watch the watchers, Snowden may well have become the most important leaker of the 21st century.

Snowden himself has managed to take refuge in Russia and disappear from the headlines, putting the full spotlight back onto his bombshell documents. But as with all megaleaks, the sheer number of scoops he's enabled threatens to overwhelm anyone tracking the NSA's still-growing scandal. Here are a few highlights from what we've learned so far in the Summer of Snowden.

For more than a decade, the NSA has been working to systematically influence encryption standards or insert backdoors in the code of commercial encryption software to enable it to access Internet users' communications, according to documents Snowden leaked to the Guardian, which were shared with the New York Times and Pro Publica. Though the published documents lack many details, the protocols the agency may have the ability to break or circumvent include Web encryption such as Secure Sockets Layer and Transport Security Layer, the Internet protocol encryption and authentication technology IPsec, common virtual private network systems used for anonymity and secure remote access, and Voice-Over-Internet-Protocol. (VoIP) The backdoor-planting projects, known as "Bullrun" in the United States and "Edgehill" within the NSA's British equivalent the GCHQ, have made "vast amounts of encrypted Internet data...exploitable," according to one leaked document.

The German newsweekly Der Spiegel wrote over the weekend that it had obtained NSA documents revealing that the agency has the ability to access a wide range of information stored on smartphones including iPhones, Blackberrys, and those running Google's Android operating system. That information includes contacts, text message traffic, and location data--the paper alludes to the NSA's compromise of "38 iPhone features." Despite losing access to Blackberry's messaging systems in 2009 after a change in how the company compressed data, the agency noted in a document that a breakthrough allowed it to regain access in 2010.

Internal audit documents from the NSA, obtained by the Washington Post, show that the agency found 2,776 incidents in which its staff had broken its own rules governing surveillance in the year leading up to May 2012. In one case, a surveillance operation continued for three months before the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which is designed to oversee the agency, first heard about it and ruled it unconstitutional. In another comic example, analysts collected phone calls from the Washington area because its "202" area code was confused with Egypt's country code, "20."

Even when the NSA follows its internal rules, it's offered a surprising number of regulatory loopholes. A document published by the Guardian showed that the NSA makes broad exceptions to its mission of only spying on foreign targets. That includes collecting and storing information on Americans when it's judged to contain “significant foreign intelligence” information, information about a crime that has been or may be about to be committed, is related to "the unauthorized disclosure of national security information,” or is involved in assessing "a communications security vulnerability.” In another exception, any encrypted data can also be held long enough to crack it.

Documents given to the Guardian revealed that the NSA helps to fund the spying operations of Britain's GCHQ, in part to take advantage of the U.K.'s more relaxed regulations of its intelligence sector. Over three years, the NSA gave more than $150 million to British intelligence services, and 60% of GCHQ's "refined intelligence" also reportedly came from the NSA's analysis.

Other documents focusing on GCHQ and published by the Guardian showed that the British intelligence service has the ability to tap transatlantic fiberoptic cables for raw Internet data, much of which is shared with the NSA.